Southern Ruby

by Belinda Alexandra

  I opened her dressing-table drawers and the sight of her neatly folded underwear and the scented soaps between them was too much to bear. I sat down on the bed. I might have to ask Tamara to help me, I thought. But then I dismissed the idea. It would have made Nan uncomfortable to have someone other than me going through the intimate parts of her life. I steeled myself and began to empty the dresser drawers, sorting what needed to be given away or thrown out from what I wanted to keep.

  Nan and I had very different tastes in jewellery. She thought only yellow gold was worthwhile, and I loved silver, white gold and platinum. She had been buried with her wedding ring, but she hadn’t left any instructions regarding her dress watches, pearls and charm bracelets. I decided I would give them to Janet. She could keep anything she wanted and give the rest to the church. I was placing the jewellery in a box when I came across a heart-shaped Lucite pendant with a pink rose accented by green leaves in its centre. It wasn’t an expensive piece but it was pretty. I remembered Nan telling me that my grandfather had given it to her when they were courting. It made me smile to think of Nan as a young woman in love, and I picked up the pendant and put it around my neck.

  ‘I’ll wear this in memory of you, Nan,’ I said out loud.

  The pendant seemed to give me a burst of strength, as if Nan was there telling me there was a job to do and to get on with it. She’d been born into a rugged farm life, where people accepted fate and were grateful to have food on the table and clothes on their backs and didn’t endlessly analyse it when life dealt them a blow. They pressed on. So I pressed on too: emptying the bedside-table drawers and wiping away tears at the sight of her Bible and reading glasses; and deadening myself to the pain when I took her landscape paintings from the wall. I was packing away her life and the room gradually began to lose its personality — her personality.

  The wardrobe was another matter. I knew that somewhere in there were letters from my mother along with photographs from New Orleans. I knew about them because when I was fifteen, Nan and I had a fight about them.

  ‘For God’s sake, Amanda! That man ruined our lives!’ That’s what Nan would say if I asked her about my father. That’s what she always said.

  I lay in bed and listened to her moving about in the kitchen, clinking plates and glasses as she stacked the dishwasher then locked the back door as she got ready to go to work. The sound of her pumps clomping down the hall sent me rolling onto my stomach and feigning sleep. She strode into the bedroom and put a list of chores on my bedside table, as she’d done each morning since last Friday when I’d been suspended from school. Nan had always been my greatest ally, my guide and my confidante, and I could talk to her about anything — except my parents, of course. Now she was mad at me.

  ‘It’s time to get up,’ she chided. ‘You can’t lie in bed all day.’

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, rubbing my eyes. ‘I’ll get up in a minute.’

  She kissed me on the cheek, giving me a whiff of Youth Dew. ‘I don’t know what possessed you and Tamara to do what you did, but I know you’re good girls at heart.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, watching her hands as she patted down the sheets. I was fascinated by Nan’s hands. They were thin and bony and translucently pale with freckles on the knuckles — not anything like my hands, which were long with tapering fingers that gave me an advantage on the keyboard but weren’t very feminine. I had muscular hands that looked like I could crush an apple between my palms.

  ‘Your grandad left me an insurance policy and this house, Amanda. I don’t need to keep working,’ Nan said, looking at me with her piercing green eyes. ‘I’m doing it so you can get the best education possible. So don’t pull any more stunts like that, all right?’

  Ouch! Did I need to feel more guilty than I already did? The fees at the ladies college were hefty and Nan was putting aside money for my university studies as well. Dyeing my hair candy pink for the school sports carnival put me only two strikes away from getting expelled.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going to the local school, Nan,’ I said, sensing I was pushing my luck with the topic. ‘They have a good music department. The master entered the school’s rock band into the Kool Skools project and now they’re getting assistance to record and package their own first album.’

  I’d sung in Nan’s church and even had some paid gigs at weddings and birthday parties but I longed to perform jazz like Ella Fitzgerald. What I wouldn’t give to be making an album! But the only performing available at my school was in the corny school musical — where girls had to play the male parts as well — or in the choir.

  Nan grimaced and hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder. ‘Singing for the pleasure of your friends is one thing but the life of a musician is nothing but drugs, debauchery, divorce and . . . death. A woman needs a profession these days and to get that you need a good education.’ She kissed me on the forehead and headed out into the hall. Before she opened the front door she called back to me: ‘Your art teacher faxed your assignment description. I’ve left it on the kitchen counter. I think Miss Ellis is rather fond of you. She said you’d make a first-class architect.’

  I heard her 1984 Volvo warming up in the drive and went to the window to watch her leave. I’d normally be going with her, to be dropped off at school before she continued on to work. I glanced at my reflection in my dresser mirror and ran my hand through my thick hair, which had been dyed back to its natural dark brown by Nan’s hairdresser.

  ‘Life’s a bitch,’ I said. There was a stack of Cosmopolitan magazines on my desk. I picked up the top one and flicked through it. The girls were so pretty with their voluptuous Victoria’s Secret bodies and sculpted features. I hadn’t told Nan that I’d dyed my hair because I was sick of being bullied about my appearance by the other girls.

  ‘Amanda came first in the freestyle today because she’s got a nose like a dolphin!’

  ‘Hey, beanpole, what’s the weather like up there?’

  The hair colour was reverse psychology: Here, I’ll give you something to really talk about . . .

  I put the magazine down and turned my CD player on full volume. Sarah Vaughan singing ‘Misty’ filled the room.

  A copy of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire lay in a hiding spot under my bed and I retrieved it to read it for the fifth time. I’d underlined the parts that described New Orleans. People found it hard to imagine that I might miss what I’d never had, but I did. I often fantasised about what it would have been like to be brought up by young parents and live in the lush, tropical atmosphere of New Orleans. I felt more affinity with Rice’s descriptions of that languid and dark arts city than I did with Roseville and its neat houses and English-style hedged gardens. Sometimes I dreamed of a white house with a turret and a balcony that overlooked a garden scented with gardenias and verdant with palms and banana trees, but I didn’t know if the picture was a memory or something that had come out of my imagination.

  As a child, I’d wished that I could make Mother’s and Father’s Day gifts at school for my actual parents, like the other kids, as well as for Nan. My mother was visible around our house in the photographs on the piano and her sports trophies in the spare room, but my father was a taboo subject with Nan. ‘A devil who drove drunk with his wife and young child in the car and ruined our lives!’ It was obvious that my brunette looks and tall stature hadn’t come from Nan or my mother with their petite figures and fair Anglo-Saxon features, which meant I must have inherited them from my father. He was half of me, and until someone told me at least one good thing about him, I’d feel despicable too.

  Why couldn’t I know something as simple as what he looked like or what he had done for a living? For the past year I’d been imagining that perhaps my father might have been an aristocratic vampire, like Louis de Pointe du Lac, and that was the real reason Nan wouldn’t talk about him.

  I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming the floors. In the afternoon, I lay on my bed with my stack of Cosmopol
itans and read an article on rhinoplasty. Nan’s friend Janet said with my height and striking features I should be a model, but the girls at school called me ‘a freak’. My nose was horrible in every way: long, dorsal-humped, with a boxy tip. Corinne Doulton tormented me at least once a week by sketching it and then passing around her artwork for the other girls’ amusement.

  ‘It’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa.’

  ‘No, it’s the Eiffel Tower after a lightning strike.’

  ‘Ha haa!’

  As I read the magazine article, it occurred to me that plastic surgery might change my life. I closed my eyes and pictured returning to school after the holidays with a pert ski-slope of a nose, no longer an ugly duckling but a beautiful swan. The younger girls would carry my books, and the boys from other schools would fall at my feet.

  I was lost in this vision when something occurred to me. What if I’d inherited this nose from my father along with my colouring and long limbs? If that was the case, how could I ever change it? It would be like destroying the last vestige of him. But how could I find out?

  I hovered at the door to Nan’s chintz and rosewood bedroom with indoctrination and curiosity warring against each other inside me. I was a serial ‘dresser up’ as a child and after one incident, where I’d used up an entire tube of Nan’s pricey Christian Dior lipstick to paint my face, I was banned from her room unless she was present. Even now I was fifteen she kept that rule. But I’d seen her pack away documents in archive boxes at the bottom of her wardrobe. Maybe there would be something about my father in one of those? My heart pounded as I approached the wardrobe although I tried to justify my actions: if Nan hadn’t been so reticent about my father, this sneakiness would not be required.

  But an hour of painstaking searching through the boxes, so as not to put anything out of order, yielded only copies of deeds to the house, my grandfather’s death certificate — giving the cause of death as cancer — and my childhood vaccination records. But then as I opened the last box, I found a smaller shoebox inside.

  When I took the lid off and saw a picture of my smiling mother holding my infant self, I had to catch my breath. We were wearing matching harlequin costumes — I guessed for the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Under the photograph was a stack of letters in airmail envelopes with a New Orleans return address. From the curvy feminine handwriting, I assumed they must be from my mother. I pressed them to my heart. There wasn’t time to read them now, but I knew what I would be doing in the next school holidays.

  There was a yellow envelope at the bottom of the box. I picked it up, surprised at its weightiness, and pulled out a stack of photographs. I shuffled through them and gasped at what I saw. There were dozens of pictures of my mother with me — on a vintage streetcar, looking at ducks in a pond, sitting under an oak tree. But the other person in the frame — my father — had been either cut out or scribbled over with black pen. In a couple of photographs a smooth tanned hand had escaped censorship, but nothing else. Nan had obliterated my father as deliberately from the photographs as she had from my life. But there was no mistaking it: my father’s hand was exactly like mine.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I turned around to see Nan standing in the doorway. Mortification paralysed me as I realised I’d lost track of time. Her eyes fell to the photographs. Her jaw tightened and her face turned dark. She didn’t look like Nan at all. She looked like a tiger about to bite.

  She snatched the photographs from me and threw them in the box. ‘You’re always asking me in what ways you’re like your mother. Well, I can clearly see the similarity now. You are as stubborn as she was!’

  I hung my head and my lips trembled as I tried to explain: ‘I . . . I wanted . . . I wanted to see a picture of my father,’ I stammered. ‘To see if we have the same nose.’

  ‘Nose? For God’s sake, Amanda!’ she said, stepping towards me. ‘That man ruined our lives!’

  It was no use trying to explain. ‘You’ll never understand!’ I shouted, before fleeing to my room and slamming the door. The sight of the Cosmopolitan magazines on my bed enraged me and I began to tear out the pages. Not only were the girls pretty but they probably knew who they had inherited their prettiness from. I had no-one to talk to about my feelings. I was an outsider: I never truly belonged anywhere.

  Nan knocked on the door. ‘Mandy?’ she called, opening it. Her gaze fell to the mess of magazine pages scattered on the floor. She sat on the end of my bed, no longer looking angry but stricken, like someone who’s had the air knocked out of them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mandy,’ she said, fighting back tears. ‘What I said about you being stubborn isn’t true. You’re a good girl who does her best despite having been put in a difficult situation.’

  ‘There isn’t anyone in the world that I love more than you,’ I told her. ‘Why is wanting to know if I look like my father so wrong?’

  She exhaled sharply and took my hand. ‘When I argue with you, it’s like arguing with Paula all over again. I’m too old for that. I don’t want to argue any more — and I don’t want to lose you like I did her. I told her to use the money she was saving from her job to put a deposit on an apartment and get a bit of security in her life first. She could travel later when she got married. But she was always ready to head off in any direction without knowing what was waiting for her at the other end.

  ‘I drove her to the airport the morning she left for her “grand trip”. She was young and lively and full of hope. As she went through the departure gate, she turned to wave at me and flashed her enchanting smile. That’s my last memory of her. The next time I was at the airport, it was to collect her suitcases and you. I didn’t even witness my only child being buried. She’s lying in a tomb in a strange city I don’t know and don’t care to know either.’ She lifted her eyes to look directly into mine. ‘Your father was careless and selfish! Forget about him!’

  I might have only been fifteen but I was wise enough to understand the truth when I heard it. Nan had destroyed my father in those photographs because she believed he’d destroyed her daughter.

  The memory of that argument with Nan was still painful, even after so many years. I had become tired of arguing with her too, so I hid my feelings. But all that did was confuse me further. Now, with her gone, not only did I not fit in anywhere but I was totally alone in the world.

  Nan wasn’t able to hide the photographs from me now. I opened the wardrobe doors, but the sight of her neatly hung jackets and dresses hit me like a wave and I shut them again. I rubbed my hand over my face then tried another time. More than anything else in the room, Nan’s clothes carried with them distinct memories: from the champagne lace dress she’d worn for my graduation to the Chanel-style suits she’d favoured for work. I took out an emerald-green cardigan and a pair of taupe pull-on pants and hugged them to me. They had been Nan’s favourite winter loungewear. I saw us sitting together snuggled up under throw blankets on the couch, drinking tea and watching episodes of Antiques Roadshow. I couldn’t understand how it was possible: how could all these things that Nan wore and were once such a part of her daily life still be here while she was gone?

  I took the clothes out of her wardrobe and laid them on one side of her bed to deal with later. My eyes travelled to the bottom of the wardrobe where Nan kept her archive file boxes. I took them all out and lined them up along one wall, but the box that had contained the photographs and letters my mother had sent from New Orleans wasn’t among them. A hollow sensation formed in the pit of my stomach. Was it possible that Nan had destroyed them?

  I moved the stool from Nan’s dressing table to the wardrobe and searched the top shelves. I spotted an archive box hidden behind a winter-weight quilt, and stretched and grasped it, then hugged it towards me as I climbed off the stool, and lowered it to the floor. The lid had been sealed shut with tape. I used my thumbnail to slit it open. When I saw the shoebox and yellow envelope inside, dizziness overcame me. I had to sit for a while and let my head clear.
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br />   After a few moments I gathered the courage to take out the envelope and look at the photographs of me with my mother in New Orleans. Tears blurred my eyes as I realised how hungry I was for any scrap of the brief life we’d had together. The photographs of us were tangible proof that our relationship had once existed.

  Then I took out the letters my mother had written.

  The first one I picked up was dated 12 October 1979 and was written on pink paper with a gingham border and a Betsey Clark waif child on a swing in the corner. The sweet musty smell of old paper made my nose twitch.

  Hi Mum,

  I’ve arrived in New Orleans! This place is like no other! I’m staying in a hostel in the French Quarter (or the ‘Voo-car-eh’ as the locals call it). Outside my window a green parrot is squawking in a palmetto tree, and across the road in a pub — the bars are open all day and night here and it’s perfectly legal to walk up and down the street with a drink in your hand — a Cajun zydeco band is playing. A woman wearing a metal washboard on her chest is beating out a blues rhythm with thimbles on one hand and a spoon in the other. I’m tapping my feet and my fingers. It’s crazy! This place is just crazy! It’s like a 24-hour party. I LUUUVVVV IT! But everyone I talk to says that if I love it now, I should come back for Mardi Gras . . .

  I stopped reading and pressed the letter to my heart. It was as though I’d heard my mother’s voice in her writing: breathy, vibrant and revealing a personality ready for adventure. She sounded so young. Well, she had been young. She was nineteen when she went to the United States. Twenty when she gave birth to me. I was older now than my mother had been when she died. It was a strange feeling to know that I’d already outlived her in terms of age.